Tag Archives: vlog

Everest the Crunch Origin Story

Despite the fact that we have not actually met at the scheduled time for years, my buddy Dave and I have had a running calendar invite to connect for breakfast every 3 weeks. We’ve kept the invite in our calendars as a little reminder to connect. Pre-covid we actually did meet every 3 weeks, taking turns buying each other breakfast.

Covid ruined that.

Then in January 2021, with loosened covid restrictions, whereby we could meet people outside our bubble as long as we were outdoors… we decided to meet and do the Coquitlam Crunch. This 241 meter hill climb became our breakfast meeting replacement.

Soon our goal was to do at least 40 a year, one for every school week. We have surpassed that every year. Today was our 259th time (although I say 258 in the video) and our next attempt will be our Everest challenge. How did we go from weekly walks to trying to do 37 (the hight of Mt. Everest) in 48 hours?

Dave shares the inspiration for the challenge in this video:

No more training is going to help at this point, it’s just rest, carb loading, and food prep now. Our mantra is ‘one at a time’… each time up the crunch we only have to worry about that one. We’ll get to 37, one-by-one.

Follow our journey on Instagram: @EverestTheCrunch 

Old jokes, new format

Build it and they will Like, Follow, and Share… the newest craze to hit the internet is nothing more than a rehashing of old ideas in a new format. By now everyone has seen the Bigfoot videos where an AI Bigfoot is doing a selfie vlog and telling jokes as well as doing ridiculous antics. If you haven’t seen them, Google ‘Bigfoot Vlog’ and they will show up in droves. I’ve notice a few things. While a few of them are refreshingly funny, most of them rehash really old jokes, many of which are based on racism, sexism, or tropes that have all been done before. It’s literally just old jokes in a new format.

But they work. They get the click, likes, and shares. They are going viral. And they are creating copycats that are now doing the same thing, using AI, but with people rather than Bigfoot. Videos that are mostly 100% realistic and yet still sit somewhere in the uncanny valley of almost right, yet not fully. And again, just rehashing old content in a new format.

Expect a lot more of this. Also expect world crisis to be leveraged for the same attention. You’ll see bombing in the middle east that’s actually just AI video. You’ll hear government leaders and celebrities saying outlandish things, except it won’t really be them. You’ll see alien landings, meteor landings, and even plane crashes that didn’t happen but were rather prompted into video reality.

When we get tired of the jokes, we’ll just start to get fooled more and more by AI drama that is invented to draw our attention. But for now, the jokes will come. They will get more inappropriate and cross lines a person wouldn’t with a video of themselves. And as attention wanes they will get more extreme, more tasteless, and so abundant that we’ll just be tired of them… as I am already tiring of them.